Federal SMA Project Issues Progress Report

The SMA Project, a National Institutes of Health program supported by SMA patient advocacy groups, reports on its therapy development strategy in spinal muscular atrophy

Article Highlights:

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), a program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has issued a progress report titled “The NINDS Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) Project Completes Discovery Phase of Therapeutics Development Program.” The report is available on the NINDS website.

NINDS established the SMA Project at the urging of several SMA voluntary organizations and patient advocacy communities, including MDA, as a way to accelerate development of treatments for SMA. The project broke new ground in government support for translational research.

A potential SMA therapeutic has been identified by the project and made available for development by the private pharmaceutical/biotech sector.

The strategy used by the SMA Project to identify and test potential drug candidates is being used as a blueprint by NINDS for therapy development in other diseases.

A number of SMA voluntary organizations and patient advocate communities, including MDA, played a key role in the establishment of the SMA Project and have provided it with ongoing support.

NINDS' December 2012 progress report states “a late-stage lead compound has been developed that may be of interest to a pharmaceutical/biotechnology company to further develop and take into clinical trials.”

“Furthermore, NINDS’ choice of SMA for this pioneering effort has helped catalyze increased interest in SMA therapy development. Development of a variety of candidate drugs and biologics targeted to SMA is now under way at several pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, as well as in multiple academic laboratories. Clinical trial resources, diagnostic screening tests and biomarkers are being developed to facilitate clinical trials of candidate therapeutics for the disease.”

“Of all the diseases that NIH could have selected for this project — thousands of disorders to choose from — they chose SMA,” Kennedy noted. She said this selection was due to a variety of factors, including promising SMA laboratory research; existing infrastructure for conducting research (thanks to investments by SMA advocacy groups); advocacy efforts by SMA organizations and the clinical and research communities; and the good chance that the lessons learned in developing treatments for SMA also would benefit research into other diseases.

Now that this phase of the SMA Project is complete, the NINDS report notes that the agency “actively encourages feedback and input from the SMA community regarding the path forward.”